If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
As far as I can tell, some of the most recent conversations to have the most uncvil remarks are conversations involving whether AI risk is a serious problem and if so what should be done about it. The thread on Luke's discussion with Pei Wang seems to be the most recent example. This also appears to be more common in threads that discuss mainstream attitudes about AI risk and where they disagrees with common LW opinion. Given that, I'm becoming worried that AI risk estimates may be becoming a tribalized belief category. Should we worry that AI risk is becoming or has become a mindkiller?
It sure seems like something is going on. Another example is Dmytry being pretty civil before he started debating LWers on AI risk.
Fun with Umeshisms:
- If you've never accidentally built an UFAI, you're spending too much time debugging.
- If you've never intentionally built an UFAI, you're thinking too much about moral philosophy.
- If you've never joined a cult, you're not being credulous enough.
- If you've never been wrongly accused of being a cult leader, you're spending too much money on PR.
- If you've never unintentionally created a real personality cult, you haven't worked enough on your charisma.
- If a speculative idea never caused you to have a nightmare, you're not taking ideas seriously enough.
- If you've never been banned from some community, you're being too nice.
Heh, good list.
For people who can't build AIs but have to deal with the AIs built by other nincompoops:
- If you've never accidentally built an UFAI, you're spending too much time debugging.
- If you've never confused God with a demon, you're being too cautious with your paracletics.
- If you've never intentionally built an UFAI, you're thinking too much about moral philosophy.
- If you've never decided to just worship the Antichrist, you're thinking too much about moral philosophy.
(I can't think of any good ones myself.)
Q: How many LessWrongians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A1: In some Everett branches the lightbulb is still undamaged. If you kill yourself in all remaining branches, the problem with lightbulb is solved. (While you are at it, why not also buy a lottery ticket, so you don't have to worry about broken lightbulbs anymore?)
A2: Changing a lightbulb would bring us closer to Singularity, and until we solve the problem of Friendly AI, this would be a dangerous thing to do.
A3: One LessWrongian writes an article about why it is rational to change the lightbulb, fifty LessWrongians upvote the article, forty LessWrongians downvote it. A discussion has soon over 200 comments, most of them discussing when it is correct to upvote or downvote something, and what could we do to avoid karma assassinations. Then a new chapter of HP:MoR is published, and the whole lightbulb topic is quickly forgotten.
A4: Eliezer already wrote an article about lightbulbs in 2007. What, you mean to really change a lightbulb? Please stop saying that; it sounds a bit cultish to me.
Also see here.
Reading this argument...
For most of human history, physicians were incapable of effectively treating serious diseases. Indeed their efforts frequently resulted in their unfortunate patients dying and suffering at far higher rates than they would have otherwise endured. Physicians only gained the ability to have any worthwhile impact on the course of major illnesses in the 1940s- largely due to technological improvements secondary to ww1 and ww2 which included the development of new drugs (sulfonamides, antibiotics, first anti-cancer drugs, first effective anti-hypertensive drugs, better vaccines etc).
Note that physicians have had almost zero input in developing all of the drugs and technology which now allow them to be somewhat effective in practising medicine.
Since a significant number of people who get into medical school have always been money and power-hungry, but lesser and timid, CONmen- they took full advantage of the situation to market themselves as mini-gods who required tons of money to exert their magic on their patients. Make no mistake.. few people who enter that profession care about anything beyond enriching themselves and bossing around sick or dying people.
When modern medicine came into being (after ww2) the population of western countries was young and relatively healthy. Consequently most of their diseases were acute or subacute, rather than chronic. Many of the then new drugs and treatments such as antibacterials, antivirals, anti-inflammatory, anti-psychotics etc were quite effective at treating many of these illnesses. For a time things looked good..Then the fertility rates dropped to sub-replacement rates and the population got older.
Today most of the illness treated by physicians are chronic. While we have made advances in treating such diseases, our abilities to treat them are pretty pathetic compared to what we can do for acute/ subacute diseases. However the need for more money and profits are driving physicians, hospitals and pharmaceutical/medical device companies to attempt to treat them with drugs and methods of dubious efficacy.
Therefore we have now reached a point where most medical treatments (by dollar value) is used to obtain small or dubious gains in life expectancy at the cost of considerable suffering for the unfortunate patients.
Most rational people understand that prolonging the life of an ill person to the point that it causes considerable suffering without any hope of recovery is not desirable and doing so is effectively torture. So why are physicians around the world, but especially in anglo-saxon countries, so opposed to euthanasia?
The standard and official explanation is that physicians look out for the best interests of their patients and want to protect them from harm. However medical errors, obvious misdiagnosis, negligence and other forms of medical malpractice are officially the 4th leading cause of death. Therefore the ‘ we are protecting patients’ line seems a bit hollow.
An alternative explanation is that patients with chronic and hard-to-treat diseases are cash cows, and the cost of specialized care and treatments of dubious efficacy are the major source of income for physicians.
Access to easy euthanasia would cause a considerable reduction in the income of many physicians. For most of them the specter of reduced income outweighs any consideration of the patients quality of life or suffering.
... made me realize that questioning the motives, integrity of doctors somehow feels like a wrong thing to do. Why do we have that taboo for this profession but not many others?
Doctors seem to have overinflated social status compared to the actual utility they bring.
We don't really have that strong a taboo. Look at how the alt med groups function quite successfully.
Incidentally, the article in question doesn't address some things that doctors were successful at before the rise of modern pharmaceuticals. Many types of surgery helped save lives. Amputations from gangrene, removal of bad appendices, and Caesarean sections are all examples that substantially predate the 1940s.
Openly questioning the motives of people that have power over you is kinda dangerous. Even if the doctors had higher probability of killing you than healing you, you don't increase your changes of survival by making them angry at you. Instead you should treat them respectfully... and avoid them whenever possible.
I am not a parent, and probably shouldn't be. While I think this is a sound argument, it may very well be a terrible thing to tell a child.
Alex has two friends: Barney and Colin. Barney almost always does the right thing. Colin does the right thing whenever it suits him, but when it doesn't suit him, he does whatever he wants.
When Alex has to decide between sharing something with either Barney or Colin, he'll pick Barney, because he can trust him more. If he has to choose someone to go on an awesome adventure with, he'll pick Barney, because he can't be sure Colin won't do something selfish if they get into a sticky situation. When he talks to other people, he'll tell them that Barney's a great, amazing guy, but he won't say the same thing about Colin, because if other people see Colin doing the wrong thing, they might think he is the sort of person who does the wrong thing.
Alex may like Colin, but he has respect for Barney. This makes Barney important in a way that Colin isn't. People will go out of their way to help Barney in a way they won't do for Colin.
As your parent, I will probably love and care for you more than anyone else in the world, but when you don't do the right thing, even I lose respect for you. If other people see you not doing the right thing, they won't respect you, and that will make your life a lot harder.
When writing this, it occurred to me that I have no idea how many of the concepts in it would carry over to an eight year old's level of understanding. Would a 21st-century first-world child even have a sense of their life being made harder?
[Meta] I hope it's okay that I posted the new open thread. Don't know what the procedure is, if any. I wanted to post something, but saw the last open thread was out of date. Please moderate/correct as appropriate.[/Meta]
you broke the code
Edit: Not really, anyone can make the open threads. But I've been doing it for a little while and I think it's a little strange that someone else did it when I'm only two hours late. C'est la vie.
Eeep! I throw myself upon the mercy of the Prophets, including but not limited to, Yudkousky, Jaynes, and OpenThreadGuy. Please don't excommunicate me. Or worse, karma-assassinate me.
Edit: To be clear, I didn't mean it as a judgment against you. It wasn't "Oh, OpenThreadGuy is late. Let me do his job for him." It was more of a "Oh, the last open thread just expired and I wanted to post something. Let me make the new one, I don't think anyone would mind."
If that's a little weird, then I happily accept the label ;)
Old discussion that I'd like to see revived if for no other reason than I think the subject matter is fantastic: Taking Occam Seriously.
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't tried to go through all of LW's archive, so I hope someone sees it for the first time by virtue of reading the open threads.
(this is not too political, I hope: just general talk about social attitudes)
I think I don't understand much of social-conservative sentiment - not policy suggestions, but the general thurst of it.
For example, people who exhibit it often use the term "permissive" as somewhat of a perjorative for several of today's societies. I don't get it: "permissive" towards what - stuff like drug use? But they don't typically use any qualifiers; they just seemingly say that not erring on the side of banning any slightly controversial thing is automatically bad! If you're arguing from a rationalist and pragmatic standpoint, shouldn't you accept that the burden of proof is on you if you want to forbid or restrict something?
I might, in theory, agree with every concrete example of behavior someone thinks should be restricted, but that doesn't make people who are OK with those behaviors "too permissive" - it just means that we have diverging views on concrete matters!
(Am I speaking clearly enough?)
Social conservatism has a very healthy respect for the concept of a slippery slope, which in and of itself is just fine from an epistemic point of view. The idea that social issues themselves are one unified slippery slope, though, is crucial to US-like social conservatism.
The idea of social issues being one unified slippery slope may or may not be true. (Unlikely. p<0.1, I think.) It is definitely informed by contemporary religious organizations, though.
Social conservatism has a very healthy respect for the concept of a slippery slope, which in and of itself is just fine from an epistemic point of view.
I understand and mostly agree; e.g. in the last infanticide thread, I went so far as to suggest that I'd bite the other bullet and consider banning abortion when technology blurs the line between pregnancy and birth even more. Yeah, that would bring real disutility to people, and banning post-birth infanticide in itself is already bringing some, but I hate the idea of putting up with infanticide enough that I'd rather have it this way. [1] Here I'm definitely with mainstream conservatives, as their objection to it is stronger and more principled than that of mainstream liberalism.
On the other hand, I think that e.g. any possible slippery-slope threats that could result from recognizing homosexual civil unions as completely equal to "traditional" ones [2] is vastly outweighed by the huge social good it'd create, both as direct utility to homosexual couples and as an improvement in moral climate and the destruction of obsolete in-group boundaries within larger society. It is in such cases that social conservative positions appear to go from defensible to utter crap in my eyes. But, as I already said, I'm inconsistent and biased by nature, and I'm OK with that.
[1] (save for excruciating and incurable afflictions - in which cases, as rumour has it, medical authorities already seem reluctant to investigate, accepting that euthanasia is the least evil solution)
[2] Religious and other private organizations should be free to restrict their "Traditional/Christian/Straight/whatever-they-want Marriage" contracts and rites to any group they want, IMO; it's just that we need a clear distinction between that and government-recognized legal union. I mean, such privately sanctified marriage shouldn't have any legal significance; people would still need a civil union in addition to it if they want to enjoy the legal benefits.
Also, ending the meaningless connection between such a civil union and sex, child-raising, etc would bring interesting opportunities, such as allowing any number of participants to enter one, or maybe having one signed between relatives.
When your opinion depends on long-term consequences of X or Y, different models of the world can lead to very different models of the future.
One possible chain of thoughts: by recognizing homosexual civil unions as equal to traditional ones, at the cost of small change in definition, people will become equal.
Other possible chain of thoughts: any successful redefinition of marriage will lead to more and more redefintions, until the whole topic becomes completely arbitrary, meaning nothing more than "two (or more) people at given moment decide to call themselves partners, but can change their minds at any moment". As a consequence there will be less stable marriages. As a consequence, children will on average grow up in worse condition, and that will have massive negative impact on the following generations. (Your solution of separating religious marriage vs civil union would only limit this impact to a part of population; but still, a negative impact on their children, causing e.g. higher crime rate of the next generation, would influence everyone's quality of life.)
I've read that particular argument a million times, and haven't been impressed. Even Konkvistador, of all people, has objected to that. (I don't wish to imply that he's somehow hidebound or inimical to progress, I just find him very reasonably cautious in all matters - not to sound like a sycophant.) I remember him trying to convince Alicorn that formal matrimonal arrangements are more or less pointless because people can have stable and loving relationships outside of a formal marriage.
Indeed, I'm totally unconvinced that most people are so irresponsible that they need formal shackles to provide a healthy and stable environment for their children, and are incapable of having a stable relationship of their own volition and without oversight. And if they are that irresponsible, they probably shouldn't have children yet.
It seems worth saying out loud that VB was not making the argument you aren't impressed by, he was referring to it, as are you. Not that you said he was making it, but it's a volatile enough subject that it's easy for people to infer conflicts.
With respect to actual content: it's often useful to make commitments to behave in certain ways.
People do this with respect to fitness goals, employment, cleaning their houses, finishing personal projects... all kinds of things. Sometimes it's even useful for me to formalize those commitments and agree to suffer penalties if I violate them. This not only signals my commitment to others in ways that are costly to fake, but it creates different incentive structures for myself.
For example, if I want to do twenty pushups three times a week but I don't seem able to motivate myself to actually do them, I might agree with a friend that once a week they will ask me if I've done twenty pushups three times that week, and if I haven't I will give them $20. That might give me more motivation to do those pushups. (Or it might not... it depends on me, and how much I value $20, and how much I negatively value lying to my friend, and all kinds of other stuff.)
Marriage seems like precisely this sort of formal precommitment to me, and seems potentially valuable on that basis.
I disagree that being the sort of person whose behavior is changed due to such a formal precommitment means I'm too irresponsible to have children. Indeed, knowing what techniques serve to motivate me and being willing to use those techniques to achieve my desired goals seems pretty responsible to me.
I disagree still more with the connotative implications of words like "shackles," "incapable of having a stable relationship," or "their own volition"
How do you pronounce Eliezer's name? I've heard his name pronounced a number of ways. Originally, I thought it was pronounced El-eye-zer. Then I watched a video where I think it was pronounced El-ee-ay-zer. And today I watched another where Robin Hanson pronounced it as El-ee-eye-zer. So which is it? I doubt he really cares that much, but I'd like to know I'm not pronounceable it wrong when I tell people about him.
Are most people here transhumanists?
Probably. If I don't want to die and would upgrade myself beyond my current physical limitations that makes me transhumanist, right?
If you are, do you have some specific transhumanist wishes?
Volcano lair with catgirls. (I'll use my spare time from there to work out where I want to go next. Right now I mostly want the 'not dying' part with the ongoing potential for improvement.)
This was recently posted in the Server Sky thread: The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects. The title kind of says it all. Basically, whenever anyone tries to put forward a Very Large Space Project they tend to gloss over the political costs and realities, hence they don't actually get done. This seems like a pretty clear cut case of Far Mode bias to me. Rationalists trained to recognize and account for this may have a better chance of getting things done.
I was recently reading through LW discussions about OKCupid. Those discussions (as well as some other factors) prompted me to make a profile. If anyone cares to critique, please do so. I have my own opinions on what I've done well and what I need to improve on, but I'll keep them to myself for the time being. I don't want to anchor your reactions.
Making a few minor edits, but I consider this first draft just about done. If you'd like me to review your profile, or if by serendipity you are interested in me and live close by, then do let me know.
A question for rationalist parents (and anyone else who has ideas): are there good child-accessible rational arguments for why do right?
Me: Please do X.
Child: No.
Me: You know it's the right thing to do.
Child: Yes.
Me: Well?
Child: I don't want to.
Me: ???
I am not a parent, and probably shouldn't be. While I think this is a sound argument, it may very well be a terrible thing to tell a child.
When writing this, it occurred to me that I have no idea how many of the concepts in it would carry over to an eight year old's level of understanding. Would a 21st-century first-world child even have a sense of their life being made harder?